ABC News: Former President George W. Bush, whose entire presidency was defined by the September 11th attacks, said in a statement tonight that President Obama called him to inform him of the news of bin Laden’s death.

Bush called the operation a “momentous achievement” that “marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”

“I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude,” the former president said in a statement. “The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O’Neill is. A decade ago, he was President Bush’s first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Colonel Qaddafi’s Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I’ve no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I’m sure there was a good reason.

Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaeda terrorists. Really.”

Really?

Absolutely.

“They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”

But hang on, generally speaking, when you hit your “debt ceiling,” your credit is at risk. If you’ve got a $10,000 credit card, and you run it up to the limit, but you need a couple more grand right now, pronto, because you outspend your earnings by 50 percent every month and you have no plans to change that anytime soon, well, the bank might increase the limit to $15,000, or $20,000. Or they might not. There is a question mark over your credit because there is a question mark over your credit worthiness: It is at risk.

Paul O’Neill seems to regard that attitude as unhelpful. So does Timothy Geithner, his successor at what is still laughingly known as the United States Treasury. Secretary Geithner says that even to be discussing the debt ceiling is “a ridiculous debate to have.”

Ridiculous?

Absolutely.

“I mean, the idea that the United States would take the risk that people would start to believe we won’t pay our bills,” continued Geithner, “is a ridiculous proposition, irresponsible, completely unacceptable.” The best way to convince people to believe we’ll pay our bills is to borrow up to our limit, and then increase the limit and borrow a whole bunch more. This would be the 75th increase in the debt ceiling in the last half-century. Let’s just get it done, and resume the party.

But if Geithner thinks that even discussing the question is “ridiculous,” then, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, why have a debt limit at all? What’s the point?

Well, because it gives us more credibility with our creditors, right? Even if we set the debt ceiling way up in cloud-cuckoo land to a bazillion trillion gazillion dollars and 83 cents, even a debt limit entirely unmoored from reality still gives the impression we haven’t quite flown the coop.

Yes, but why does the U.S. government need to maintain credibility with its creditors when increasingly it’s buying its debt from itself? Every month there’s more and more U.S. Treasury debt and fewer and fewer people who want it. The Chinese are reducing their exposure. The investment behemoth Pimco, which manages the world’s largest mutual fund, recently dumped U.S. Treasuries entirely. To avoid the failure of U.S. bond auctions, or an increase in interest rates to make them more attractive to rational lenders, the U.S. government’s debt is bought by the U.S. government’s Federal Reserve.

I tried up above to come up with a real-world comparison for the debt ceiling — imagine you’ve got a credit-card limit of 10K, etc. — but it’s harder to do that with the Fed’s policy: Imagine your left hand issues an IOU to your right hand in return for an e-mail with a large number on it . . . oh, never mind, it’ll only make your head hurt. “Quantitative easing” is extremely quantitative if not terribly easing, so raising the debt ceiling would enable us to issue more debt for us to buy from ourselves. You can see why Secretary Geithner thinks that’s a no-brainer.

Growth: It's been nearly two full years since the recession officially ended, and the economy is still struggling to get off the ground. It didn't have to be this way.

When the Commerce Department released its estimate for first-quarter growth — a meager 1.8% — President Obama's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, at least conceded that "faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn."

And granted, the economy needs to expand by at least 2.5% just to keep up with growth in the labor force. So at 1.8%, we're essentially losing ground, a fact that last week's 429,000 initial jobless claims underscores. But what Goolsbee didn't acknowledge is that the economy could be growing at a much faster rate, and would be if it weren't saddled with Obama's reckless policies.

How do we know this? Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).

What's dramatically different, however, is how each president responded.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

In New York, I attended an interdenominational church located at 51st and Broadway called Times Square Church, even though the blue awning over the entrance proclaimed “The Church that Love Is Building.” I mean, honestly. Love? In a church? It seemed a little far-fetched to me, but over 8,000 people gathered to worship in the old Broadway theater every week, some of them driving more than two hours and staying for all three services. Being in New York was so spiritually disorienting for this southerner that had there been tire swings instead of pews or jugglers instead of a preacher, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Times Square Church is a “charismatic” church, meaning they believed in healing, visions, prophecy, etc. Over a hundred nationalities worshipped there, however, and I couldn’t tell the “tongues of angels” from Swahili. My high-school Latin didn’t help — since no one was singing Happy Birthday — and the disparate languages melded into what I imagined to be the very sound of holiness. It contrasted jarringly with the neon decadence of the surrounding Times Square. In some churches, people arrive early to shake hands, talk about work, and drink coffee. But these congregants came to pray, books embossed with the words Heilige Schrift orSanta Biblia opened in their laps. In fact, a half hour before the opening song, only balcony seats would still be available. I never saw the main floor up close.

But what I could see startled me. The faithful were down there, crowding the stage, raising their hands in prayer. There was an elderly black man who stood on the floor to the left of the podium who simply yelled “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” over and over until the service began. (And even intermittently through the sermon.) His staccato chant combined with the anguished prayers of women either terrified me or electrified me, but either way I was content to observe from the balcony.

Pastor David Wilkerson had founded the church, but he was also famous for his 1963 bestseller The Cross and the Switchblade and for founding Teen Challenge. The first time we were there, he said, “Ladies, when we stand to sing, please don’t leave your pocketbooks on the ground. Some thieves are here in the sanctuary, so keep an eye out on your belongings. And for those of you who came here expressly to steal,” he said, “we welcome you. You came here thinking you’d leave with a few bucks, but you’ll leave knowing the life-changing love of God. Stay as long as you’d like.”

We (I am including myself!) desperately need to repent, America! There is no hope in this life without Jesus. The politicians and power brokers are going to do whatever they will but We the People need to return to our American roots - God Almighty. Only He can save us, in the end. No politician can. - Reggie

This is a very sad day for American Christians but a glorious day for David Wilkerson. For years, I have believed David to be America's prophet. The Lord seemed to always give David a word for the church when needed and his love for Jesus knew no bounds. He will be greatly and deeply missed. Let us pray for his wife and family during this time of separation. - Reggie

David Wilkerson

Rev. David Wilkerson, founding pastor of Times Square Church in New York City and author of the well-known book The Cross and the Switchblade, was killed Wednesday in a head-on collision in Texas. He was 79.

Wilkerson's wife, Gwen, was also involved in the crash. She is in fair condition and expected to recover.

"Thank you for all your prayers and the outpouring of love you have shown for the Wilkerson family," Times Square Church Senior Pastor Carter Conlon said in a statement, Thursday, on the church website. "We are comforted by knowing that Pastor David has been enjoying the full presence of the Lord for more than a day now."

Conlon added that the family will have a private funeral in Texas. A public memorial service will be held at Times Square Church within the next two weeks.

From Times Square Church: "The official memorial service will be held at Times Square Church in New York City within the next two weeks. The service will be streamed live on the Times Square Church website."

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

YouTube description:Speaking with CBS News before a listening session in Wisconsin's First District, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan hits back on false partisan attacks leveled against the House-passed FY2012 Budget Resolution, which puts the federal budget on the path to balance and the economy on the path to prosperity.

Monday, April 25, 2011

This is what big government does for a wealthy country. It destroys it. - Reggie

Commentary: China’s economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that “most Americans are not feeling the difference” from the Fed’s “experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.” It reports that “a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits of the central bank’s ability to lift the nation from its economic malaise.”

It’s a terrific story, and well-timed, given that on Wednesday Mr. Bernanke will break tradition and meet with the press. It is part of the Fed’s effort to get ahead of what is emerging as a public relations catastrophe, as gasoline is nearing six dollars a gallon at some pumps, the cost of groceries is skyrocketing, and the value of the dollars that Mr. Bernanke’s institution issues as Federal Reserve notes has collapsed to less than a 1,500th of an ounce of gold. Unemployment is still high. Shakespeare couldn’t come up with a better plot. But how in the world did Mrs. Palin, who is supposed to be so thick, manage to figure all this out so far ahead of the New York Times and all the economists it talked to?

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

In 2008, the voters of America put a dictator in the White House. I truly believe this man will lie, steal, cheat and possibly kill to stay there. I have never seen such abuse of power in this country. God help us! - Reggie

From the man who said he would bring a gun to a knife fight, the latest ploy to cut his opponents off at their knees. This one is not based on arguments or facts, but on sheer abuse of the powers he has as President.

Kenneth Vogel writes in Politico that President Obama is "considering a number of measures to compel disclosure of the kind of anonymous campaign contributions that helped finance millions of dollars of attack ads against Democrats during the 2010 elections."

These measures appear broad in scope:

The White House last week began circulating draft executive order that would require companies seeking government contracts to disclose contributions -- including those that otherwise would have been secret -- to groups that air political ads attacking or supporting candidates.

The proposed order follows several actions by regulatory agencies that have a similar intent of making corporate and individual donations more transparent.

Last month the Securities and Exchange Commissionissued a decree that could result in shareholders having more say in corporate election spending. Democratic appointees to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission are pushing measures that could make public currently anonymous contributions to outside groups.

Administration critics, including the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are seizing on the White House's draft executive order, in particular, as evidence of an attempt to use executive power to punish or silence political adversaries, while rewarding supporters.

Calling the draft executive order "an affront to the separation of powers ... (and) to free speech," chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff said it "lays the groundwork for a political litmus test for companies that wish to do business with the federal government" and is "less about disclosure than intimidation."

Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg requested Wednesday a statewide recount – the first in 22 years – to check the results in the April 5 election for state Supreme Court race she lost to Justice David Prosser, the Government Accountability Board said…

Kloppenburg also called on the board to appoint a special investigator to probe the “actions and words” of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus…

State elections officials scoured [Nickolaus's] canvass report and the April 5 election results over four days during an on-site investigation. On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Board issued a report saying except for a few “anomalies,” the canvass report and municipal election returns were consistent so no revisions in the canvass were needed. The board intends to issue a report within 60 days on other questions about Nickolaus’ elections operation.

Kloppenburg said an investigation of the Waukesha County clerk was necessary and that something must be done so that “real change” comes to election practices and procedures in Waukesha County.

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. President Obama’s perpetual campaign cash-o-matic machine kicks into high gear again this week as the celebrity-in-chief heads to Hollywood for several high-priced fundraisers. But while the Democrats’ 2012 re-election team stuffs its hands into every liberal deep pocket in sight, questions about the Obama 2008 campaign finance operation still fester.

Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee — which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a “routine review.”

But there’s nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama’s campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.

There’s nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.

And there’s nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling “more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns — including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate,” according to Roll Call.

Among the Obama 2008 campaign committee’s shadiest transactions that have gone unpunished:

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

"Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Only the iPhone records the user's location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. "Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn't find any," said Warden. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this."

Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said: "This is a worrying discovery. Location is one of the most sensitive elements in anyone's life – just think where people go in the evening. The existence of that data creates a real threat to privacy. The absence of notice to users or any control option can only stem from an ignorance about privacy at the design stage."

Warden and Allan point out that the file is moved onto new devices when an old one is replaced: "Apple might have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that's our specualtion. The fact that [the file] is transferred across [to a new iPhone or iPad] when you migrate is evidence that the data-gathering isn't accidental." But they said it does not seem to be transmitted to Apple itself.

Amid all the crises now gripping the world - human rights atrocities, poverty, famine, disease, genocide - the United Nations will devote at least some of today's agenda to debating the inalienable rights of "Mother Earth." Maybe that's because Earth Day is on Friday. Or maybe it just has nothing better to do.

Bolivia's madcap coca farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales, is leading the charge to create a UN treaty that would give our planet, that mass of molten lava and rock, as well as all of the creatures that inhabit it, the same rights as humans. This is the same Morales who believes that "the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism," just in case you were wondering.

Certainly, capitalism seems to be the enemy of Morales' vision for Bolivia, which is among the poorest countries in South America, with more than half of its population living in poverty, according to a dire UNICEF assessment that also says the Morales government "restricts the exercise of human rights."

But despite those needs, a new Bolivian law is primed to recognize 11 new rights for nature, including "the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," according to a summary by the U.K.'s Guardian. That law would also establish a Ministry of Mother Earth.

It sounds compassionate, but only if you think that the centipedes of Bolivia are more important than its people; only if your zeal for a "green future" trumps the possibility of poor children around the world having a future of any kind.

Now the Morales circus is coming to New York City, where he will try to hector the UN into adapting the ecotyranny he is imposing on his own people.

This blow-hard populist is hardly the first person to make asinine claims about the natural world. We see it when Hollywood airheads like Danny Glover suggest that the earthquake that devastated Haiti was due to global warming. We see it when televangelists like Pat Robertson warn that natural disasters are God's way of punishing our sins.

Heck, we saw it this very week, when mass murderer Charles Manson (he of the swastika tattooed on his forehead) broke his 20-year silence to bemoan global warming with this baffling gem: "Everyone's God and if we don't wake up to that there's going to be no weather."

But the real danger is not when madmen rant but when the evidence-free but ideology-rich posturing of people with actual influence is taken seriously.

Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which helped him win the Nobel Prize, is taught as science in many schools, even though much of the alarmist research it peddles about greenhouse emissions has been called into question.

This is stunning! Does the Constitution matter anymore? Have we lost all of our rights? - Reggie

This machine can let police see all of your photos. Even that one.

(Credit: Matt Hickey/Cellebrite)

The Michigan State Police have started using handheld machines called "extraction devices" to download personal information from motorists they pull over, even if they're not suspected of any crime. Naturally, the ACLU has a problem with this.

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

The problem as the ACLU sees it, is that accessing a citizen's private phone information when there's no probable cause creates a violation of the Constitution's 4th Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Monday, April 18, 2011

In my review of the film Atlas Shrugged earlier today, I noted that Barack Obama’s latest policy address would fit perfectly into the story — as an example of the clueless and malevolent mercantilism depicted in both Ayn Rand’s novel and the film’s first installment. Turns out that our friends at FreedomWorks were way ahead of me on this point. Thursday, they released a mash-up video that did what the filmmakers deliberately chose not to do, which is to cast President Obama in a lead role by using his own words — and make the connection even more clear:

Note: I have planned to see Atlas Shrugged but haven't yet. I may wait until all three films are released and see them all at once if we still have a country, by then.

Last night, I purchased and downloaded the book on MP3 (the abridged version) and have listened to over half of it today. I must say, I am amazed how a book printed in the mid 1950's has prophesied our current decline and government overreach. Incredible.

If you don't see the movie, get the audiobook or the paperback. It's worth your time and money. It is jaw dropping accurate. - Reggie

The agency kept America’s credit rating at triple A but for the first time since it started rating US debt 70 years ago, cut its outlook from “stable” to “negative”. A negative outlook means there is a one-third chance of a downgrade in the next two years.

Doubts about US creditworthiness could threaten the dollar’s use as a global reserve currency amid the rise of rivals such as China that have better growth prospects and fewer fiscal challenges.

A dominant theme of President Obama's budget speech last Wednesday was that our fiscal problems would vanish if only the wealthiest Americans were asked "to pay a little more." Since he's asking, imagine that instead of proposing to raise the top income tax rate well north of 40%, the President decided to go all the way to 100%.

Let's stipulate that this is a thought experiment, because Democrats don't need any more ideas. But it's still a useful experiment because it exposes the fiscal futility of raising rates on the top 2%, or even the top 5% or 10%, of taxpayers to close the deficit. The mathematical reality is that in the absence of entitlement reform on the Paul Ryan model, Washington will need to soak the middle class—because that's where the big money is.

A number of conservative activists and bloggers say they’re furious at media magnate Glenn Beck for what they call content theft. Over the past several years, Beck has relied on video, audio and written content from others to fill his radio and television shows, as well as his websites. Often he has credited his fellow conservatives for their work. Yet in many other instances say dozens of conservative journalists who spoke to The Daily Caller, he has not, often taking elaborate steps to cloak the origins of the material.

Publisher Andrew Breitbart has seen a number of his stories surface on various Beck media properties over the past few years. While he describes himself as “grateful for the many times he has credited me and my sites,” Breitbart says that “sometimes he also uses other peoples’ work without crediting them, making it appear as though it were his own. But especially since adopting ‘The Truth Has No Agenda’ slogan – and trying to deliberately re-position himself as the pious conscience and judge of many of those he took content from – he has exposed himself to his new motto’s unforgiving standard.”

By any standard, Beck seems unusually reliant on the work of others, and unusually reluctant to credit it. In an interview with TheDC, Roger L. Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media, suggested that Beck has committed the journalistic equivalent of a notorious crime. “It is not a question of just doing it right the majority of the time. It is a question of doing it right always,” Simon said. “Doris Kearns Goodwin is forever a fraud in my estimation because she has been caught plagiarizing once. If you rob a bank once, you still robbed a bank.”

A remarkably large number of conservative writers say they feel robbed. During the March 18 airing of his television program, for example, Beck ran a portion of video created by a Chicago-based blogger who calls himself Rebel Pundit. The blogger, who does not publicly reveal his name, says he was initially pleased to see Beck running his video, which featured left-wing protesters demanding amnesty for illegal immigrants. He was soon shocked, however, to see that Beck’s staff had obscured the watermark logo of his website, RebelPundit.com, from the tape.

“I put my website name on there for a reason – to bring people from the movement to my website so they can see the other stuff that I’ve done,” the man behind Rebel Pundit told TheDC. “You’ve got pretty much the biggest guy in the movement take your stuff and actually have his editors spend the time to scrub my name off of it.”

Ironically, while Beck’s staff had gone to the trouble of removing any trace of the phrase “rebelpundit.com” from the video, they apparently missed an obvious obscenity in the background of the frame. Clearly visible on a sign held by one of the protestors was the demand, “Open the fucking border.” When it appeared on his show, Beck said, “Oh, don’t show that please.”

It was hardly an isolated incident. On a number of occasions, Beck has aired videos on his show without mentioning that they were produced by the Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media watchdog group. On February 28 of this year, for example, Beck usedMRC footage of Van Jones speaking at a rally in Washington’s Dupont Circle. Beck never indicated where the video came from, even as he berated the press for failing to investigate who was behind Jones’s rally.

So much for the new era of fiscal responsibility. The federal government’s dependency drones have been spared the chopping block. After vowing to eliminate funding for President Obama’s bloated $6 billion AmeriCorps social justice army, House Republicans retreated — and will shrink the AmeriCorps budget by a minuscule 6.7 percent.

Politicians originally sold AmeriCorps as an alternative to big government — a program to “renew the ethic of civic responsibility and the spirit of community throughout the United States.” With bipartisan support, the program has morphed into an all-purpose progressive slush fund. Instead of reining in the national service boondoggle, Washington has turned taxpayer-subsidized helping hands into a legion of Nanny State handout helpers. Goodbye, AmeriCorps. Hello, FoodStampCorps.

Yes, across the Internet, the feds are recruiting AmeriCorps VISTA (“Volunteers in Service to America”) workers to apply for jobs as publicists for the welfare state. Their mission: to sign up as many people to federal food stamp rolls as possible. Because, you know, the record-breaking 12 million that have been added since Obama took office is apparently not good enough.

President Obama may have never met a "czar" he didn't like and he's not about to bid farewell to any of them now, despite a budget deal he struck with Republican leaders last week that eliminated four of these positions.

The budget compromise that Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reached in the final moments before the government shut down last Friday included language effectively eliminating the czar positions overseeing health care, climate change, the auto industry and urban affairs – positions that don't require Senate confirmation.

But after signing the legislation Friday that funds the government through the end of September and cuts $38 billion in spending, Obama issued a signing statement saying he would ignore the part about his czars, arguing that defunding those positions violated his constitutional authority.

Republicans cried foul over Obama's move.

"It's not surprising that the White House, having bypassed Congress to empower these 'Czars' is objecting to eliminating them," Mike Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, said in a statement.

The Federal Election Commission has launched an audit into President Barack Obama's record-breaking 2008 campaign.

Individuals familiar with the campaign told Roll Call Friday that the FEC has been investigating the financial records of Obama's previous campaign. The scope of the probe, which began approximately two
years ago, is unknown. Presidential audits typically take years to complete and can cost millions of dollars.

The newly formed 2012 Obama campaign did not deny there was an audit, but a spokeswoman called it a "review."

"The FEC is conducting a routine review — as is true with the McCain Campaign, the Romney Campaign and many others — to determine if they have any questions with the information reported," said Katie Hogan, deputy press secretary for the campaign. "Given that there was an historic number of contributors and contributions — nearly four million and over nine million respectively — this takes time."

The Republicans are spineless cowards and the Democrats are bold, Socialists/Communists. Is there time to build a third party to save our nation or is America forever lost? - Reggie

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boldly predicted that Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling next month, warning that failure to do so would bring "catastrophic" consequences for the U.S. and global economies.

Geithner, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said that if House Republicans were to push the vote to the brink or fail to raise the limit, it would "make the last [financial] crisis look like a tame, modest crisis."

Geithner said that Republicans have told President Obama they "recognize we have to do this, and we're not going to play around with it."

"There's no alternative, and they recognize that," Geithner said.

Geithner said the Republican leadership assured Obama in a meeting at the White House on Wednesday that they understand the gravity of the debt ceiling vote and that they will vote to raise it.

I saw a little of this on Fox and Friends this morning and decided to post it. This is as much of the "royal wedding" that I care to see and I'm sure this video is much more fun than what will actually happen.

I'm also posting the original JK Wedding Entrance Dance that inspired T-Mobile's William and Kate extravaganza. - Reggie

I always enjoy the bit in Planet of the Apes where a loinclothed Charlton Heston falls to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the eponymous simian planet is, in fact, his own — or was. Also the bit in Independence Day where Lady Liberty gets zapped by space aliens. And in Cloverfield when she’s decapitated by a giant monster. And in The Day After Tomorrow when she’s flash-frozen after polar-ice-cap melting brought on by a speech from Dick Cheney. I’ve been enjoying such moments since, oh, the short story “The Next Morning” in the 1887 edition of Life, illustrated with a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. The poor old girl was barely off the boat from France, and she’d already been pegged as the perfect visual shorthand for societal collapse.

But the United States Postal Service has now gone the Hollywood apocalyptics one better and produced a somewhat subtler image of civilizational ruin. The other day the post office apologized for its new stamp honoring Lady Liberty. Due to an unfortunate error, the stamp shows not the 19th-century Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor but the 1990s replica that stands at the New York–New York Casino in Las Vegas.

An ersatz statue of pseudo-liberty standing guard over the world’s biggest gambling operation: What better way to round out a week in which the Republicans pretended to pass the most historically historic budget cut in history while the president pretended to come up with a plan to address the debt? All while pretending to wage a war in Libya whose most likely outcome seems to be that the only Arab dictator to sleep soundly in his bed at night during these turbulent times will be doing so under cover of a NATO no-fly zone for the rest of his 75-year term of office. In such a world, the USPS, bless ’em, has come up with a far more plausible emblem of societal devastation than Hollywood’s space monsters and climate-change fairies.

After the revelations that the $38.5 billion 2011 budget cut will in reality either cut a mere $352 million from the 2011 budget or, in fact, increase it by $3 billion, it might be easier just to build a replica White House, Capitol, and Congressional Budget Office at the new Beltway Casino next to Caesar’s Palace. Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is. Barack Obama says we need to “win the future,” and one more roll of the dice should do it: a trillion dollars of chips on the stimulus came up empty but let’s pile another couple trillion on Obamacare, and “high-speed rail,” and “green jobs,” and “broadband access” . . . And all the while Wayne Newton is singing “Danke Schoen” in Chinese. But don’t worry, we’re not just throwing our money away. We’re playing to a system! The president calls it “investing in the future.”

How do you “invest in the future”? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That’s what the government of the United States is doing. It’s spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour of every day of every week — all for your future!

Most of the “futures” we’ve “invested” in are already at record levels of spending. Obama and his speechwriters are among the laziest men in the republic, so they cite the same dreary examples every time. In all three of his State of the Union addresses, he’s brought up the highway system, and he did so again in Chicago at the end of the week. If the Republicans get their way, he said, “We can’t invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes.”

Sarah Palin spoke at a Tea Party rally yesterday in Madison Wisconsin (video below). The video is not clear due to the weather but her message is very clear. She can say more in a fifteen minute speech than other candidates say in a forty minute speech. She cuts through the smoke and mirrors to get to the heart of the problem.

I must say, I had never considered a woman for President of the United States until Sarah Palin. My favorable impression of her increases with everything she does. Has she made mistakes? Yes! Is she perfect? No! But more important than that, she loves America! She does not apologize and is not ashamed about her love for America. She will not bow down to other heads of state because of America.

I try to look at the possible 2012 candidates with hope but none of them measure up to Palin, in my eyes. She reminds me of Ronald Reagan and I try not to think of her in that way but it just happens, automatically. She makes me think of the Reagan ad 'It's Morning in America' from the 1984 campaign and this speech sounds like a campaign stump speech. She calls Obama out and tells him, 'Game on!'